Many would-be rock lotharios confess to starting a band as a way to meet girls, but the path to musicmaking for Irish singer-songwriter James Vincent McMorrow went round a rather different bend. He had to overcome his intense self-consciousness to unleash his ethereal falsetto in front of anyone, let alone a nubile fan base.

"The school I went to wasn't built for music, and I wasn't built for music as well because I was quite shy," the Dublin performer, 31, says from a Canada tour stop. In school, he'd try to sing as softly as he could so he could slip in among the male tenors, rather than end up among the girls. "So in the front room of my parents' house, after they'd left, I'd sing in front of the piano and try and fail and try again and the next day would fail a little less."

He took up the drums because, as he puts it, "it was the heartbeat of the music, and I wanted to be onstage with people but didn't want to be seen." He was too shy to go into a studio with his music, so he learned production in order to do it all himself.

That said, those familiar with the folkier arrangements of his debut, "Early in the Morning," and even his popular cover of Steve Winwood's "Higher Love" shouldn't be shocked by the thoughtful, minimalist R&B ornamenting his latest, second album, "Post Tropical" - whether McMorrow is hitting the high notes and waxing nostalgic for a first love in "Cavalier" or juxtaposing succinct beats and plangent keys with an airborne chorus of his own layered vocals in "Red Dust."

That falsetto flits in the rafters of registers frequented by Antony Hegarty and Smokey Robinson, as the twinkling, ambient precision of his indie soul places him on a beatific spectrum between Twin Shadow and Toro y Moi.

Rhythm and warmth were McMorrow's focus when he settled in to work on "Post Tropical" at a studio on a Texas pecan farm, with the lyrics following a month later.

"I'd sit on porch and fine-tune and change things and have them sit together and have a unifying feel, rather than thinking, 'Here's a bunch of lyrics,' and shoehorning them in. It was all about serving this idea that music is a profound thing."